The Vivisector (47 page)

Olivia was barely allowed to enjoy a sense of achievement: Emily’s creaking shoes were approaching through the shallows. When she had paddled close enough to clutch her mistress by the arm, she advanced her lips, which tonight were powdered as pale as her cheeks, and began a piece of muted recitative:

‘This Italian lady has locked herself in the convenience, dear, and won’t come out to do the prawn cutlets, because she says Ethel was unkind to her, and she couldn’t help bumping the
charlotte russe
. Now Ethel is wondering what ought to be done, Miss Boo?’

‘Oh God, who am
I?
’ Mrs Davenport stamped, and frowned black.

Emily appeared shaken to discover that the one who should have known the answer, didn’t.

‘Can’t Spurgeon fetch her out?’

‘Mr Spurgeon washes ’is ’ands of it, dear.’

Olivia remembered to smile at her two favourites before repeating: ‘Oh, God! Nothing I undertake fails to turn into shambles. The simplest little occasion! Come with me, Emily!’

She marched off through her shambles. Objects in jade trembled on their pedestals as she managed her explosive dress. Emily followed, slower, on account of her rheumatism and her status.

‘Shouldn’t we find the others?’ Madame Pavloussi anxiously asked, because the laughter sounded several doors away.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, but casually. ‘There’ll be no prawn cutlets, but an otherwise excellent dinner.’

Madame Pavloussi was already striding on her short legs across empty rooms. ‘I am wondering what will become of my poor husband. He will feel unhappy, left to so many strangers.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought he needed protection.’

‘I suppose not.’ She sighed.

They turned a corner, and the thunder told them they were almost there; Madame Pavloussi appeared less anxious to arrive.

‘Look at this painting!’ she whispered, and nudged him conspiratorially. ‘Is she a girl? Or an octopus?’

‘Probably an octopus.’ He laughed at a good joke.

It was the original version of Rhoda Courtney Olivia had winkled out of him. In other circumstances he might have resented the reaction of this charming, but probably ignorant, woman. Now he forgave, because she herself was a work of art, and he would have liked to fall in love with her.

‘You agree?’ She laughed back; her teeth looked short, and strong, and real.

‘I’d never thought of the octopus. You’re right, though.’ She had given the painting a new life, in which suckers grew from the thin arms, the tones less milky-pink than grey.

If left to himself he would have continued thinking about it; but Madame Pavloussi’s nostrils had taken up a scent.

‘You don’t know the girl?’ she asked.

‘She was my sister.’

‘Oh, I am so, so sorry!’ His companion was gasping, and twisting her enormous pearl.

He was less conscious of her as he flirted with his slowly developing vision: the octopus-Rhoda, sponge attached to one sucker, beside the more or less unalterable bidet on its iron stand.

‘You say she
was
your sister. Your sister is dead?’

‘I don’t know,’ he had to confess.

Madame Pavloussi’s eyes had begun to water: they were magnificent in their horror—or was it pity? He could not yet have told with any certainty.

‘But you must admit,’ she cried in self-protection, ‘the painter is cruel. Why do painters have to deform everything they see? I do not understand what is modern painting about. Perhaps you will explain to me—one day—I mean, after dinner.’

‘Of course—if there’s time.’ Lucky he hadn’t signed his painting.

She appeared so distraught he would have liked to take her hand, but here they were on the threshold of the dining-room.

The marooned guests were standing around, wondering, though not yet seriously. While waiting, they admired the table. Their first thoughts had naturally been for the place cards, and some of them were still preoccupied with these; through bad eyesight or discretion they had not yet discovered what they were in for.

‘Aren’t the little stands exquisite! She really has exceptional taste,’ one lady was remarking.

Shuard, who was ready to set up as an authority on almost anything, assured her that the little jewelled claws which held the place cards were ‘genuine Faubourg’.

The two late arrivals couldn’t take an interest in the cards as their fate was already known to them.

Madame Pavloussi gestured at her husband in a far corner. He was still wearing the abstracted smile, which might or might not have acknowledged his wife’s sign. It was more likely directed at the whole and nothing of the room, while Monaghan the banker talked on at him. After tempting the shipowner to express his views on the recent rise to power of the German National Socialists, the banker gave up, and switched to yachts. Pavloussis seemed to remain untouched.

‘You see, your husband was in no need of your protection.’

‘No,’ she agreed vaguely.

Either she was disappointed, or else her gaffe over the subject of the painting had made her shy; if it hadn’t been for their hostess’ decree she might have moved away.

The shipowner had an enormous nose, like a ridge of grey pumice, or lava; and brilliantine failed to remove a texture of coral hummocks from his hair. As the banker’s yachts began foundering, Pavloussis spoke through his smile, in a voice unperturbed by its own foreignness or irrelevance.

‘My pressing problem at present is cats. I have four of them. I no longer love my cats, which are selfish and unlovable. I must only find how far I am morally obliged to them. Can you advise me, please, Mr Monragan?’

The banker turned a congested red, and laughed too loud at the foreign joke; while Madame Pavloussi murmured to herself: ‘Yes, yes, the poor cats.’

Although several of the others had joined in the laughter the situation was becoming too strange; on the whole the guests were beginning to look uneasy and unshepherded.

‘It would be far more sensible if everyone sat down.’ The headmistress was coming into her own. ‘Boo has been called away for a little to attend to some domestic matter.’

The company did as told: most of them appeared relieved to have returned temporarily to school.

‘Isn’t it a pretty table?’ continued the headmistress, whose name was Miss Anderson. ‘Boo was always original; but the bird, I remember—the bird belonged to Constance—Mrs Hollingrake.’

Association with an important family and knowledge of its history made Miss Anderson proud. The bird was dutifully admired, except by the banker, who scowled at it: who ever heard of a glass bird, standing amongst a litter of rock, in a dish of water, in the middle of a dining-table!

The headmistress couldn’t resist glancing in a certain direction. ‘I’m sure Mr Duffield must appreciate the arrangement: it’s so artistic.’ Then she burned, all along her downy lower jaw.

No doubt she detested his paintings, and probably this was as close as her uprightness would ever let her come to malice.

But the crystal bird in the centre of the table, to which she would have drawn his attention, if it hadn’t already been drawn, seemed to him one of the happiest surprises Olivia had ever sprung. Perched on a crag of rose-quartz, its wings outspread above the crackled basin of shallow water, in which glimmered slivers of amethyst and a cluster of moss agates, the crystal bird could have been contemplating flight in the direction of Hero Pavloussi seated immediately opposite.

‘Right, Miss Anderson,’ he called back to the headmistress. ‘We can go some of the way together.’

Nervousness, or a wish to interpret subtleties, made them laugh at his flat and fatuous repartee. Miss Anderson looked mollified.

Under cover of their approval he glanced at Madame Pavloussi to see what impression Olivia’s conceit had made. He caught what might have been the last refractions of a childlike pleasure in the pretty-coloured stones before she lowered her eyes. She sat rather glumly looking at her own hands, her chin drawn in as though suffering from indigestion, or a surfeit of English.

At that moment Spurgeon threw the door open, and Mrs Davenport returned to her party, as from a recent triumph. A slight glitter in the whites of her eyes, perhaps from a snifter of gin en route to the dining-room, increased her dash and rakish-ness. Sitting down at the table, she destroyed the castle in lace and linen waiting in her place. The rucked-up sleeves of the carnation dress had grown positively businesslike.

‘I’ve discovered tonight that I’m both a locksmith and a plumber.’ Then she added, looking at him across the table: ‘But there won’t be any prawn cutlets.’ Her face was so expressive of radiant fulfilment it must have confirmed for some of those present that the painter was her lover.

He would have liked to watch Hero Pavloussi for her reactions to Olivia’s return, but his right-hand neighbour began to break down the barrier which, till now, he had kept between them.

She worked with skill and confidence. ‘Since we first met, Mr Duffield, in this house, I’ve bought two of your paintings.’

He couldn’t remember the woman and failed to read her name on the card.

‘Which?’ he asked: when his paintings became merchandise he could only practise resignation if he wasn’t stung to ribaldry.

She mentioned an early work—he could just visualize it—and one sold more recently to pay a heavy bill at the tailor’s.

The woman’s appearance gave no clue to a former meeting. She was wearing an elaborate head-dress of rigidly set toffee curls. Her face was square-cut, not exactly coarse: it had been too carefully worked on; the throat thick and rather muscular; her jewels, though unremarkable, represented a solid investment.

‘Who sold you the paintings?’ he asked, because it was his turn.

She mentioned a Syro-Maltese who passed for French, flickering her silver-green eyelids, composing her orange mouth without disguising her satisfaction.

‘Diacono? Then he must have stung you!’

‘Oh, don’t say that!’ the woman protested in mock despair. ‘I was so anxious to own a Duffield; and you make it too difficult for us to collect you.’ Even when admitting her weaknesses, she gargled her words so effortlessly she must have been to a very good teacher.

He grunted. ‘I don’t remember your name,’ he admitted.

‘Elise Trotter.’ She dipped her smeared eyelids.

Of course—Mrs Trotter! The claret ‘birthmark’ no longer rose up the muscular throat to plaster itself on the square-cut face. He laughed with genuine pleasure, almost affection, but could see she suspected his laughter. She grew opaque as she made a pass at the kind of soup which satisfies nobody, except possibly the cook who has sweated to clarify a convention rather than a soup.

‘Wasn’t there a
crèche?
’ he asked.

‘Fancy your remembering!’ Elise failed to restrain Mrs Trotter’s gush of pleasure, and only now the claret birthmark began clothing the heavy face.

Almost at once she recovered her self-possession and confided very earnestly: ‘I love to do something for the children. It’s so rewarding. ’ She turned her social conscience towards him. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she continued, ‘I want to persuade Olivia—she’s so generous of her time—to visit the
crèche
on Mothers’ Afternoon. ’

‘Mightn’t it start a revolution?’

‘Oh, no! Definitely no!’ Mrs Trotter bit into her theme with conviction. ‘Poor people only hate the rich politically—in the abstract, as it were.’ Here she lowered her artistic eyelids. ‘They adore to see them in their clothes and cars.’

He felt guilty for his own ambiguous allegiances, and would have liked to look towards the one who had been given him, if not as his mistress, his spiritual bride. Wasn’t the crystal bird poised in flight towards the chosen couple?

But Hero Pavloussi had been appropriated by the companion on her left: an intellectually aggressive young man from Adelaide, a lecturer in Greek, with a reputation for sodomy. The jealous groom resented his bride’s sodomite.

Boo Davenport was saying: ‘You refuse soup. Fair enough; soup isn’t to everybody’s taste. You turn up your nose at this rather
exceptional
mousse. How do you exist, darling? On air? Tell me—do—for my figure’s sake!’

Pavloussis shifted position, and sulkily churned out: ‘Noh! I eat. I eat bread. I drink water.’ They had, in fact, brought him what he had asked for: a basket of bread and a jug of water. ‘I eat and drink thus, because I suffer with the intestines.’

His wife looked at him in pain, though he didn’t notice; while the young man from Adelaide was explaining the
Oresteia,
which to his certain knowledge only he was capable of understanding.

Pavloussis sulkily consented: ‘I will try a small spoonful of your mousse.’

‘But it’s
my
mousse!’ Mrs Davenport made an amusing pretence of protecting her plate with her arm. ‘Let them give you some of your own.’

Not only his face, his whole body refused it. ‘Mmm! It is good—your mousse.’

It pleased him to lean over her as he ate, an arm extended along the back of her chair. Apart from anything else, the hostess was put out because the cutlery was being disorganized.

Madame Pavloussi wrenched herself away from the
Oresteia
. ‘You see—Cosmas is so
bon enfant
he can’t bear to offend her, although he suffers, and will pay for it.’ She laughed in melancholy sympathy.

‘I’m glad you consent to address me. I thought you’d cast me off.’

‘I—had—
cast?
’ Though she was feeling her way, it sounded like a whipcrack; she ground her short teeth together. ‘You are too successful.’ She took a great draught of wine. ‘I am afraid.’ She dried her lips methodically. ‘I am not successful at anything—except that I catch a—a
good
husband. And then it is not I. It is Cosmas. Who begs me till I have to accept.’ Her laughter became reckless.